Pragmatics in Aphasia: Crosslinguistic Evidence

Previous research suggests that English Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics retain sensitivity to pragmatic factors governing forms of reference, in particular the ability to choose lexical expressions that convey givenness and newness of information. The present study investigates the generality of this phenomenon across patients and language types. Normal and aphasic speakers of English, German, and Italian described nine picture triplets in which one element varied while the others remained constant. Dependent variables included lexicalization versus ellipsis, pronominalization, and definite and indefinite article use. For a subset of German and Italian patients, data were compared to performance in a biographical interview. Results indicate that (a) the pragmatics of reference are preserved in both Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics, despite syndrome-specific problems in retrieving content words and/or closed-class grammatical elements, and (b) certain language-specific patterns of reference are also preserved, including crosslinguistic differences in subject omission. Differences between picture description and the biographical interview reinforce this conclusion. Evidence for the preservation of pragmatics in aphasis is not surprising in its own right, but evidence for the sparing of language-specific relations among pragmatic, lexical, and morpho-syntactic patterns can be used to argue against any strong view of grammatical impairment as a disconnection syndrome and/or a loss of grammatical competence. Instead, these data support theories in which grammatical impairment is viewed as a performance deficit.